ABSTRACT
One difficulty in thinking about the Labour Party in a historically informed way is that beyond clichéd generalities – such as that the Labour Party is ‘the party of the working class’ – there is so little work to build on, whether as history, theory or politics. Both Marxists and social democrats tend to deal in timeless and unspecific categories – reformism, parliamentarism, leadership, rank-and-file. Little attention is paid either to the major transformations which have taken place within the Labour Party and the trade union movement in various epochs and crises; or at the way in which these might relate, positively or negatively to changing class formation and party affiliation, changes in the character of central and local government and changes in the place of Britain in the global economy.
